Category Archives: 21st Century Skills

The Learning Isn’t Over Until…

21st Century Skills, Education, learning, teaching

I have been learning non-stop for the past two weeks. First Educon 2.5 and then VirtualVA2013. Lots of conversations, glimpses into innovative classrooms, and connections with other thoughtful educators. I’ve been reflecting on the experiences but haven’t had time to put fingers to keyboard. Here are the big themes that have stood out in my personal reflections…I’ll expand on them in future posts but for now, I’ll start with the bulleted list:

  • Schooling vs Learning…but also Jobs vs Work: This distinction rose out of a conversation about how happy kids and teachers were on snow days. I pointed out that lots of grown ups were also excited to miss a day of work.  There seems to be some parallel between the two worlds: schooling and jobs both imply structure while learning and work seem to imply objectives and goals. The consensus seems to be that we have put too much emphasis on developing structures that are keeping people from enjoying learning or work and really accomplishing worthwhile goals. But can we ditch the structure completely? I was particularly intrigued with an idea I’ve encountered before: that we need to talk about the whole system including the physical spaces where we learn and work. Hacking education goes way beyond a new curriculum or even a new pedagogy.
  • Doing More Than Just Showing Up: In the midst of all this learning, I’ve been reading Seth Godin and he has had a couple blog posts that add meaning experiences I’ve had, especially at Educon. Beyond Showing Up and Watching Is Not Doing address the idea of being more involved in our lives and our learning. Educon is the perfect example: you get out of Educon what you put in. There are conversation leaders who help provide some structure but you are expected to participate by offering your ideas, sharing your resources and tweeting your heart out. We had an “open mic” session during VirtualVA2013 that mimicked a bit of Educon and gave us a chance to talk about some of the big themes that had come out of the week’s sessions. Our opening and closing sessions were more about conversation than slides and the presenters willingly engaged with the attendees.
  • Entrepreneurs vs. Entrepreneurial Spirit: The panels at Educon talked a lot about how we can help kids become entrepreneurs. I just finished reading Yong Zhao’s book World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students as part of an ISTE SIGAdmin book group so I was particularly interested in the intersection of the book with the conversations. Someone made the distinction between the people (entrepreneurs) and their dispositions (entrepreneurial spirit) that made a lot of sense to me. And there’s a lot more here to explore…why entrepreneurs and schooling don’t seem to mix and if schools can produce entrepreneurs at all.

I am also aware that there is a lot of overlap between these three themes…it’s part of the problem I’ve had this week trying to sort out the various strands of conversations. I think it can be simplified a bit: the ultimate goal is to provide learning experiences (spaces?) for our students that challenge and engage them in meaningful ways and help them develop into thoughtful, active citizens.

The Case for Crafts

21st Century Skills,

Can I start by saying that it’s 6:00 PM and it’s dark outside? We felt sorry for the commuters in the highway cameras they show on the news as they will be driving home in the dark for the next few months.  Winter seems to come with the time change. More time for indoor sports, including something I love to do: needlecrafts ranging from crocheting to knitting to sewing with the focus mostly on crocheting.

I have been a crafter all my life. My grandmother taught me to crochet. She also sewed. My dolls had unique, homemade clothes. If she were still with us, my grandmother would be a hit on Etsy.

I love making things. I find crocheting to be both challenging and relaxing at the same time. It involves math and patterns. I also make pop up cards where I learn a little bit about physics, I think.

So, I was happy to see that Craft is included at Make, the website devoted to DIY and how to projects. The focus tends to be on digital and electronic gadgets. But there, in the midst of Arduino boards and 3D printers, are crocheted crew members from the Enterprise and a quilted Kindle cover. These may not be the typical Martha Stewart kind of crafts but they show the fun of creating stuff.

The maker movement reminds us of the pleasure of creating by hand. There is a sense of being connected to a long tradition of folk artists and basement inventors. And, in my case, to my grandmother, who was never very far from a crochet hook or knitting needles.

Friday Find: Why Empathy is Important

21st Century Skills, Education, school reform

This blog post showed up in Zite this morning: Glimmers of Hope in the Education Debate. The writer makes the case that the two sides are not as far apart as it might seem.  He shows several places where the seemingly rigid accountability movement is opening to the possibility of non-cognitive skills:

Friedman gives a nod to the Common Core Standards, adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia — and long anathema to many in the progressive educator circles — which establish clear learning goals and competencies in math and literacy for students across multiple grade levels. Quoting Duncan, he cheerfully writes, “For the first time in our history, a kid in Massachusetts and a kid in Mississippi will be measured by the same yardstick.”

Even there, however, the battle lines are no longer quite as rigid as we tend to think. Earlier this year,Expeditionary Learning — known for an educational model built on Outward Bound, with an explicit focus on empathy, collaboration, and self-discovery — was hired to develop the curriculum and professional development training for grades 3-5 of the Common Core for the state of New York.

It’s a big deal, because for the first time, it means we don’t have to choose: we don’t have to choose between academic learning and non-cognitive development; we don’t have to choose between overly burdensome (and by many accounts, meaningless) standards and nothing at all; we don’t have to choose between the interests of teachers and the interests of those who control them.

It’s worth a read: the cynical side of me couldn’t help but think that Flowers was being a Pollyana, something she says of herself. The people she reads might be interested in redefining “highly skilled worker” but I haven’t heard a whole lot of discussion of empathy in the mainstream discussion.  Maybe Paul Tough‘s book will help form a foundation for discussion. And, maybe I’m just in a negative mood since my current read is Jonathan Kozol.

The blog post is part of a larger website focused on empathy, which is sponsored by Ashoka, an organization that strives to develop the citizen sector of society. They believe that empathy is an important 21st century skill:

We know that a child who masters empathy at the age of six is less likely to bully ten years later, and that, for students, having one supportive relationship with an adult outside the family can be the difference between success and failure as an adult. And we know that far from being a “nice-to-have,” empathy – and the various skills it entails – is increasingly critical to our success at home, in the workplace, and in the world.

I was also intrigued by the writer’s comment that he had a Google alert related to empathy.  That was not the kind of search time that occurred to me so I signed up. The first email included a wide range of articles from a report about research that shows empathy can override analysis in the brain, a description of a new app designed to make commuting on the London Tube less stressful, and an interview from The Salt Lake Tribune where a CEO discusses the characteristics of great leaders, one of which is empathy.

I was a bit surprised by the depth and breadth of articles and am looking forward to future alerts. There are articles, well written blog entries and lots of videos. One series tells the story of a Tokyo teacher and his students who write notebook letters to each other:

Friday Favorites

21st Century Skills, Education, technology

One of my online students wondered what a NETS school would look like.  I immediately thought of two of my favorite case studies from Edutopia.

The first profiles Newsome Park Elementary School, a science magnet school in Newport News, Virginia.

The second describes Eva LaMar’s 3rd graders who are engaging with local history in powerful ways.

Both these videos are old and so you’ll see bulky digital cameras and Alphasmart keyboards. But, it isn’t the technology that makes the difference here. It’s what the students and teachers are doing with that technology to support their learning. The pedagogical ideas are important.

The Present of Work

21st Century Skills, learning, thinking out loud

Tim Stahmer at Assorted Stuff points to an article in Forbes about WordPress and Matt Mullenweg.  The company has employees all over the world who work from home. They do have a big travel budget and are able to meet with their team at spots all over the world. And their work lives along with that of the lives of workers like me suggest that this is rapidly becoming the present nature of work so it becomes all the more pressing to help our students figure out where they fit in this world.

Tim asks the question I asked several years ago when I was describing my own “work” life: what skills and mindsets do we need in order to work in this kind of world?  In 2008, I focused on the need to find a balance between work and play when what passed for work often seemed like play.  For me, that continues to be the biggest issue: when you don’t have a particular start and end time to your day and you really love what you do, there is the potential to simply work all the time.  Additionally, since you don’t have the promise of a regular paycheck, you are always hesitant to turn down offers so you end up working on multiple projects at a time, which requires the ability to juggle activities even as it can create a varied and interesting to do list.

In 2008, my attempt at an answer to Tim’s question got at that second issue: the ability to plan and implement projects. I felt then and still do that we need to give kids more opportunity to not just work independently but to take charge of that work.  I have taught with colleagues who, when assigning individual projects, provided a packet with very prescriptive steps for how to accomplish the work. I know why they did it: they had long experience of students waiting until the last minute (the night before) to tackle what was meant to take a month of ongoing work.  My simple suggestion would be that rather than the teacher developing the schedule, make developing the schedule and interim due dates part of the project. So, learning how to work becomes part of the work itself. That’s how it goes in the real world: a client provides an overview and a due date and then it is left up to the worker to determine how and when the work gets done with check ins along the way to confer and collaborate with the client.

As for finding the balance, I think that’s a tougher problem and one I am wrestling with right now. I have a copy of this article by Tony Schwartz–The Magic of Doing One Thing At a Time–in Evernote, and I find myself reviewing it at odd moments. When I first read it, I bristled a bit, particularly over the third behavior of disconnecting completely.  In that 2008 blog post, I talked about how I almost never disconnect even when I’m on vacation and I had some perfect rationalizations for it.  But is it healthy to always be connected.  The article would suggest that it is not and I find myself annoyed to be answering work-related emails on Saturday or Sunday and then realize it is my fault for checking my email in the first place.

The lessons in the article might be good ones to introduce in some way to students.  We’ve always done it, even in the pre-digital era when we told students to turn off the TV when they did their homework. And we can integrate the three behaviors in our own lives and our classrooms in appropriate ways as well.

This blog post represents my attempt to work on the second behavior: Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. I am hoping to work writing into my daily practice so rather than immediately opening email today, I perused some of my favorite bloggers to find a topic for my own thinking.  (Thanks, Tim, for being the spark.)